At least two groups of people will welcome the appearance of this volume: cartobibliographers, and the growing number of collectors of old county maps of the British Isles. This is the third volume in the series compiled by Hodson of Bibliographies of County Atlases Published after 1703, and the first to be issued by the British Library. Yet another feather in the BL publishing cap! The two earlier volumes were published by the author under the imprint of the Tewin Press, but happily the British Library has become responsible for distributing these and can accept orders for them. I can well imagine that those map collectors and librarians who acquire this volume will lose no time in procuring its two predecessors.
Of course, the 25 years covered by this book were among the most prolific in English map production. It was the period of Bowen and Kitchin, Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hogg, John Cary and others whose works receive meticulous citations here. But it should be noted that earlier cartographers such as Herman Moll and John Seller also make regular appearances because of the reprints of their works published in the period covered by Hodson. The many editions of Francis Grose’s The Antiquities of England and Wales issued in 1772 and later are fully cited because they reprinted Seller’s maps drawn much earlier in the eighteenth century.
This is a fascinating bibliography in which to browse. Collectors and students of maps of particular counties will all surely find material of great interest. I myself was intrigued to find on page 155 a reference to a guidebook to Eastbourne (then East‐Bourne) published in 1787 and reprinted in 1809, which included the John Seller map of Sussex. Possibly my own Seller map of the county was cannibalized from a copy of that guidebook. It could be, but I think not.
Hodson pays full tribute to the work done by librarians in collecting and preserving county atlases, and as well as the British Library, he includes among these the Bodleian, the Cambridge University Library, Guildhall Library, and the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland. He also acknowledges debts to earlier map bibliographers such as Chubb, Skelton, Howgego and Elizabeth Rodger. Finally, it is good to see that this volume is dedicated to the memory of Sir George Fordham, who invented cartobibliography nearly a century ago. Donald Hodson must be thanked and congratulated on the appearance of this painstaking volume, which is in the best traditions of bibliographical work.
